A Meta-Ethnography of the Factors that Shape Link Workers' Experiences of Social Prescribing

A meta-ethnographic synthesis of qualitative studies on link workers' experiences, developing a novel conceptual framework from across the existing literature. Demonstrates how systematic qualitative synthesis methods can produce theoretical understanding of a relational role that quantitative evaluation alone cannot capture.

Develops a conceptual framework for understanding how social prescribing link workers, who connect patients to community resources, navigate the relational structures between healthcare systems and local communities. The network position of link workers, bridging institutional medicine and informal community support, produces a distinct form of knowledge about patient needs that neither system generates alone.